Just three years ago, a comparatively minor but related injustice occurred when Abel Ferrara’s remarkable film Pasolini, in which Willem Dafoe gives a spot-on portrayal of Pasolini’s last days, showed at the major festivals but failed to gain distribution in North American theatres. This likely had something to do with Ferrara’s angry stand-off with his distributor over the final cut of Welcome to New York, the directorial cut of which is reported to have been an uncompromised take on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair. In the UK, it took an intervention by the British Film Institute to get the Pasolini film into theatres, and a Blu-ray release from the Institute to get it into homes. No such white knight came to the film’s rescue in North America, so you need a European-region-compatible Blu-ray player if you want to see it (incidentally, the BFI disc is currently very reasonably priced at Amazon).

As I look back over my past blog posts about Pasolini films, it occurs to me that I never did blog my impressions of his last two features Arabian Nights and Salò—I guess it’s too late to do first impressions, but I hope before the end of the year to blog some second or third impressions of those films, if only to satisfy completist tendencies.

Last week’s “Luis Buñuel in Mexico” three-night master class with Guillermo del Toro at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto was a fantastic event. Before I get to some screening takeaways, I want to say up front that I really like how TIFF is delivering on curation & access with an event like this. $62.25 members/$75 general public for six films over three evenings—with GdT himself dishing insight—was value for money (and indeed sold out very quickly). TIFF’s director of adult learning Theresa Scandiffio did a great job of keeping things on time and on point, and no doubt did a lot of work behind the scenes to make this event happen.

When del Toro first started dropping hints about this event, I was hoping it would be part of a broader retrospective of Buñuel’s work, similar to what London’s ICA did a year ago. As it turned out, three consecutive nights as one-off event worked out really well for me, as I was able to go to Toronto for a week and take in the whole thing.

Too often—and this is one of the first points that del Toro touched on—Buñuel’s Mexican output has been dismissed as inferior to his later, better-known European films like That Obscure Object of Desire, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and Belle de Jour. Del Toro’s six-pack of mostly-underappreciated Buñuel works included four films recognized to varying degrees as artistic masterpieces (Él, Nazarín, Viridiana, Los Olvidados), as well as two (deceptively) straightforward melodramas (Susana, El Bruto), and he came prepared to defend all of them. In the 1950s, he pointed out, Mexico was the Hollywood of the Spanish-speaking world, and films made there were dominating screens in Spain and elsewhere. If drama is a torture of despair, melodrama is a torture of hope, del Toro observed, and Susana and El Bruto, while respecting formula (something del Toro defends as a form of cinematic discipline), stir in plenty of subtle Buñuelian elements, with frankly sexual moments, playfully—and often darkly—Freudian imagery, and of course the inevitable dash of foot fetishism. I came away convinced that these two films are, in the words of Philip French, “significant bricks in a major oeuvre.”

Buñuel and Hitchcock are del Toro’s two favourite filmmakers, he told us, and Él, Buñuel’s most Hitchcockian film, was one of the two biggest discoveries for me personally, of the six films. Much like Rossellini’s La Paura, it’s a case of a master filmmaker deeply absorbing the techniques of Hitchcock’s British and early American films, and then taking that narrative to a darker place than Hitchcock was ever prepared to go. But, fascinatingly, it is also immediately clear that it was enormously influential in turn on Vertigo—leaving me with the feeling much like suddenly having heard for the first time the opposite side of a phone conversation.

Nazarín was the other film that fascinated me the most. The most Pasolini-esque of Buñuel’s films (yet preceding all of Pasolini’s films) with its ironic Christ-figure at the centre of the narrative, it was the most allegorical and perhaps the most difficult of the films on offer. Its narrative direction is not always clear but its individual episodes are fascinating; I very much look forward to a re-watch, perhaps paired with his later, similar film Simon of the Desert.

The other two films were more familiar to me. I remembered the gripping social-realist aspects of the award-winning Los Olvidados—I’d forgotten about the brilliant nightmare sequence, which I doubt I will forget again. Viridiana is by far the most familiar and most cherished of these films for me, but of course it’s been available as a decent Criterion-released DVD for ten years now.

And that brings me to one of the major issues that del Toro raised on the second night of the master classes—the poor quality of some of the prints. I was glad for the opportunity to see what are likely the best-available versions of these films, but the quality of the prints and transfers was, well, a mixed bag. Del Toro says that he would be willing to put some effort behind getting them properly restored and released as high-quality Blu-rays—if I can help out some way, Señor del Toro, and/or TIFF friends, sign me up! I would love to see that happen for all six, but especially for Él and Nazarín. In the meantime, here are your best options for home viewing. None of them are available in an English-friendly Blu-ray release.

I’m feeling a bit silly and regretful. If I had my Pasolini watch-through to do over again, I never would have let myself get knocked off course by the impenetrability of his Medea, which made me back up, read the play, and then watch the movie a second time. Based on that experience, I decided to read each of the source texts for the Trilogy of Life (The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights), and then at least part of the multiple sources of Salò, before attempting the films.

Reading The Decameron was pure enjoyment but it took a long time, and although I got a start on re-reading The Canterbury Tales, which I hadn’t touched since painfully, slowly making my way through portions of the original text as an undergraduate, I fell off the wagon, and so did my Pasolini viewing project.

This week I decided to just take the plunge and watch Canterbury, Arabian Nights, and Salò, and I now realize that my fretting and delay was all for naught. The films are all, like Decameron, perfectly comprehensible without knowledge of their sources. It’s now clear to me that Medea is an outlier in the Pasolini oeuvre. Yes his films are intellectual rigorous, yes they display a supreme cinematic intelligence, but Pasolini never talks down to the viewer, and is never willfully obscure. Knowing what I know now about his films, my advice to the first-time viewer is this—with that one exception, you really don’t need to know the sources to enjoy and grasp any of his literary adaptations, so just go ahead and watch them already.

That advice goes double for The Canterbury Tales, which moves with a breezy delight that belies its rigorously-conceived underpinnings. If Pasolini’s was a painterly approach to filmmaking, then the middle film of the trilogy represents his quickest, tightest, and surest strokes.

That extends to his self-casting as Geoffrey Chaucer, on which he commented: “As an actor, I had decidedly more fun in this role than as Boccaccio’s Giotto, who’s always so worried about his work… Here I joke and mock my own human ‘inventions.'” In fact early reviews were not favourable to this portrayal, which was seen as not representative of the range of tone of the original works. But his choice to shape the character and the work to his own purpose has been largely validated by critical consensus over time.

With the whole Trilogy, and especially with this film, Pasolini was creating images of sexuality that were simultaneously daring in their explicitness, polymorphous in their content, and innocent and playful in tone. Thus it was extremely disappointing for him when the success of the films led to a whole new exploitation subgenre that was predicated on the perception of his films as being lurid and transgressive—as detailed in the excellent 36-minute documentary Pasolini and the Italian Genre Film, included with the BFI Blu-ray release of this film.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the release, a couple of weeks ago, of the new British Film Institute box set of six Pasolini films on Blu-ray. I can recommend it without reservation even though I won’t be purchasing it myself—it simply collects the six of his films that the BFI has already released on Blu-ray disc, five of which I own already (the sixth, Salò, I have in its Criterion release, but will likely double-dip for at some point just to lay my hands on the additional special features). If you love cinema, and you don’t own these already, and you can play Region B Blu-ray discs, you need this, it’s as simple as that.

For the 100th anniversary of Ingrid Bergman’s birth—my 100th blog post. Thanks to all my readers and for all the positive feedback I’ve received in the past three years. I just re-upped with my hosting service so I guess you’re in for another year of this…

The Roberto Rossellini/Ingrid Bergman Collection
(BFI 3x BD)

This is the second three-disc Blu-ray set of Rossellini films from the British Film Institute this year, following on their excellent War Trilogy release. Criterion was of course the first to release a box set of Roberto Rossellini’s films starring Ingrid Bergman, and that release was so brilliant that I proposed it as the best of 2013. That Criterion set is built around three features: Stromboli, Journey to Italy, and Europe ’51, whereas this new BFI box offers Stromboli, Journey to Italy, and Fear.

About Fear. My first impression was that it’s rather fascinating to see Rossellini essentially doing a Hitchcock-style film (if slightly German-expressionism-inflected) starring Ingrid Bergman. But I have to admit that my interest flagged a bit in the second half hour. I’m so attached to Rossellini’s rough-sketch approach to filmmaking that the smoother Hitchcockian feel began to make me sense something missing—until the Big Twist happens an hour in, one that is so emotionally brutal that it feels genuinely dark in a way that the more aestheticized Hitchcock rarely manages to touch. However—hopefully I’m not giving too much away—as with Journey to Italy, the closing scene turns away from that darkness in a way that will feel overly abrupt to viewers not used to Rossellini’s rhythm. My single reservation: with its German cast and aesthetic touches, I would really like to see the German cut of this film, and I imagine I would prefer it to the English. But this restoration is flawless, and the film is unique in the Rossellini oeuvre, so once again, props to the BFI for making it available.

Rossellini directed five feature films starring Bergman—the fifth, Giovanna d’Arco al rogo / Joan of Arc at the Stake, is really a filmed stage play performance and is not included on either box, and in fact was not included in the ten-film “Projetto Rossellini” restoration project that was recently undertaken by the Cineteca di Bologna. You have to concede that Criterion went the extra mile by including Europe ’51 (my personal favourite of the four Rossellini-Bergman feature films I’ve seen) in two restored versions, whereas the BFI has simply included the three films that were restored as part of the Projetto.

So, to double-dip, or not? Does the BFI’s box offer enough additional value to justify a second, overlapping purchase? Apart from Fear, here’s what it offers that the Criterion set does not:

The Machine That Kills Bad People (La Macchina ammazzacattivi, 1952). From Rossellini’s Bergman period, but not featuring Bergman, this is, as the box notes promise, a fascinating film. It’s a pleasing special feature for completists—the “Projetto Rossellini” restorations included eight fiction features, and with this inclusion all eight are now available in English-friendly editions—four in each of the two BFI sets.

Viaggio in Italia (1954). The alternative, Italian cut of Journey to Italy. Criterion’s box included the Italian cuts of Stromboli and Europe ’51, but, for some reason, not the Italian cut of Journey—though its differences with the English version are perhaps not as substantial as in the other two cases, it is a welcome addition here, and I enjoyed seeing the tighter cut with its mostly-Italian supporting cast speaking in Italian.

Bergman & Magnani: The War of the Volcanoes (La guerra dei vulcani, 2012). An entertaining documentary (in Italian, subtitled in English) “charting the scandal of the Magnani-Rossellini-Bergman love triangle” that cleverly tells its story partly by deploying scenes from Rossellini’s and Magnani’s films that mirror, sometimes uncomfortably so, episodes in their real-life relationships.

Ingrid Bergman at the National Film Theatre (1981), an interview before an audience, with a Q&A session, that doesn’t perhaps have much to add on the Rossellini years, but is entertaining for other reasons and worth a look for Ingmar Bergman fans (she is hilarious when talking about Casablanca). This was an event organized by The Guardian and hosted at what is now the BFI Southbank.

Adrian Martin 2007 commentary on Journey to Italy. The BFI release also brings over the Laura Mulvey commentary (2003) included in the Criterion release. Both are insightful and worth the time.

Bottom line: If you’re even half as much into Rossellini’s films as I am, you want this—an essential purchase for any serious collection.

The BFI’s new box set, released April 20 of this year, was a blind buy for me—I hadn’t seen any of the four Dreyer masterworks featured. I came to these films via the same route that I suppose most do: blown away by The Passion of Joan of Arc every time I see it, and wanting to see more of the Danish director’s unique vision.

Master of the House was released on Blu-ray by Criterion in March, but this set is the only high-def video presentation of the other three—Day of Wrath, Ordet, and Gertrud—so if you live in North America, here is one more great reason to invest in a multi-region player, if you haven’t already.

The latter three are 2008 restorations, and Master of the House was restored in 2010. It’s taken a while for these film to see an HD release but I’m happy that it has finally happened.

I’m now convinced that Dreyer is one of the greatest yet least showy directors of psychological cinema. He’s Buñuel without the surrealism, Bergman without the archness, Bresson without the obliqueness, Von Trier without the excess of sadism, and he’s cast a long shadow of influence for which he perhaps still doesn’t get proper credit.

If there was one specific expectation I brought to my first look, it was that Ordet might at last give me some kind of context or explanation for the WTF ending of Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, which it famously inspired. I can now report that Ordet‘s ending is equally WTF-inducing, so I’m not sure that I’m any further ahead there (I learned from the booklet notes, though, that Dreyer saw his ending as explicable by non-miraculous means).

For me the most revelatory of the four films was his final opus, Gertrud, which has long been a divider not than a uniter of viewer opinions. With its long takes (the longest of any of Dreyer’s films), it has been criticized as “stagey,” which I guess is the sort of thing that people say about films that remind them of being bored at the theatre—when they don’t understand the differences between the way that stage drama scenes and film scenes are blocked out and shot. For me it’s about as perfectly directed as a film can be, and still carries incredible emotional power in its methodical way. It doesn’t surprise me to learn that Godard considered it one of the two best films of 1964.

Master of the House (1925) — This silent film is presented here in two versions, one with Danish intertitles optionally subtitled in English, and one with English intertitles. The Criterion edition, by contrast, comes with its own newly translated English intertitles, and no Danish option.

Day of Wrath (1943) — This film comes with alternate opening and closing sequences in English and Danish, seamlessly branched—I recommend selecting the English option as essentially all of the film’s action remains intact while the sequences in question scan vertically through vintage-type hymn lyrics in the respective languages—subtitling is more of an annoyance than anything else.

Ordet (1955) — My dream Dreyer box would include a widescreen framing of this film, which was shot for Academy standard but also meticulously planned so that it would crop for widescreen presentation (which you can see for yourself by paying attention to the framing). We only get the full-image 4:3 presentation here, but, OK, that’s a nitpick. Ordet is included on the same Blu-ray disc as Day of Wrath, so I suppose that a widescreen version would have required an additional disc.

Gertrud (1964) — The third BD comes with, in addition to the feature, a half-hour making-of doc about Gertrud, an 8-minute interview with Dreyer, and seven of his short films.

In addition to the three BDs, there is a DVD that contains My Métier, a 1995 doc about Dreyer’s life and career, along with 80 minutes of outtakes and even a trailer for the doc. Included as well are 21 minutes of interview and other archival footage, and two audio/slide presentations totally 26 minutes. This is a surprisingly deluxe set considering its unfussy, straightforward packaging. The BFI has really been delivering with excellent box releases in 2015 and this is no exception.

The restoration work for the films transferred here was performed, as one might expect, by the nonpareil Cineteca di Bologna, in 2013, and the image is a substantial upgrade, as you can see in the comparison screenshots in DVD Beaver’s review. What you can’t see is the even more remarkable improvement in sound. I did a little toggling between this edition and the Criterion DVD set from 2010, and the audio restoration is a massive step up in fidelity and clarity.

Because Rome, Open City is important not just to film history, but to history in general, and likely because it is more conventional than Paisan or Germany Year Zero in its construction, it has tended to overshadow the other two films. And yet the latter two are more representative of Rossellini’s particular genius. So the presentation on these discs perhaps levels the playing field, allowing all three films to be better appreciated as the masterpieces they are.

What makes the 2010 Criterion DVDs still worth having is the incredible forest of extras, several hours’ worth, which really help to illuminate the films and their context.

The BFI Blu-ray set brings forward perhaps the best of these—a half-hour visual essay about the entire trilogy by Rossellini biographer Tag Gallagher called “Into the Future.” It also has two features that the Criterion box lacks: a 2005 documentary Children of Open City in which Roma: Città Aperta lead kid actor Vito Annicchiarico, nearly six decades on from the film, goes on a surprising journey of reminiscence, and, remarkably, a freshly restored transfer of Rossellini’s Amore (1948), a two-part anthology film that showcases the incredible acting talents of the great Anna Magnani. The first part is from a play by Jean Cocteau, and the second is scripted by, and features an appearance by, Federico Fellini, complete with a remarkable blond dye-job.

While the 2010 DVD box is being target-marketed to me via Facebook for “only” $69 at amazon.ca (before tax&shipping), the new BFI box came from Amazon UK for $56 all in, thanks to the continuing relative strength of the Canadian dollar against the UK pound. (Canadian collectors note: Amazon UK is a fantastic source of Blu-ray deals, especially, but not only, if you invest in a multi-region player.)

So, the Criterion box may be the winner on extras, but if you want the most pristine presentation of these historic films, the new BFI box is a slam dunk. The time may come when Criterion releases a set that combines the best of both, but in the meantime, this is the Blu-ray release of 2015 so far.

I’m used to thinking of the category “spaghetti westerns” as a fairly inexhaustible pool of films, so I was rather surprised when it clicked with me recently that the entire Sergio Leone oeuvre is comprised of just six mature films. Long ones, to be sure, and rather more chock-a-block with filmic references than I ever knew until I found myself on a Leone bender this month.

My head was originally turned a few months ago by the fall 2014 release announcement for the “Extended Director’s Cut” of Once Upon A Time in America (itself not a western, of course), which thanks to funding from Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, and from Gucci, runs 251 minutes, 22 minutes longer than the previous 229-minute cut. As someone who continues to be interested in film restoration in general, and the work of the Cineteca di Bologna in particular, I blind-bought the new Blu-ray edition on its September 30 release, taking the opportunity to finally watch this film and to have a first experience of it that much closer to the director’s original vision.

This summer had already seen MGM re-release The Man With No Name Trilogy, in an edition that replaces their 2011 release of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with a new Cineteca di Bologna restoration. With the fresh flurry of interest in Leone the 2011 Blu-ray release of Once Upon a Time in the West could be had cheaply so I picked that up too. MGM followed up Warner’s release of America a week later (October 7) with a low-priced ($9.97 on Amazon.ca at this moment) Blu-ray disc of Duck, You Sucker, which means that all six Leone masterpieces are now available in high def.

As it comes to us on this budget disc, Duck, You Sucker is sort of a hot mess. It has undeniable allure: it is Grade A Leone, it is all the more enjoyable for being rarely seen and hard to find, it is an evolutionary missing link between the two “Once Upon” films (and in fact it it was called Once Upon a Time… the Revolution in some European releases and that is probably the best title it had, certain much better than, for example, A Fistful of Dynamite). However it is a sub-par release of a damaged film. No further cleanup has been done since the 2007 DVD release, and thus the image contains plenty of visible noise and artifacts. The disc has no main menu, thus the film auto-starts on load, and has no new special features. However it carries with it the special features from the DVD release, including the excellent “Sorting out the Versions” doc, which at least makes it clear why certain transitions in the film really make little sense. The upshot is that the best that could be done with the elements at hand was done, in terms of restoring the film to its theatrical cut. But even the theatrical cut didn’t completely make sense, so in order to create a fully-realized artistically-integral cut of the film it seems unavoidable that someone would have to do what the Film Foundation just did with America and find additional elements and bring them back in.

Does all of that sound like a recommendation? It probably doesn’t. Therefore it’s incumbent on me to say, if you have ever enjoyed any of Leone’s films, you owe it to yourself to see all six of his masterpieces, the flawed ones. Duck, You Sucker, awkward title and all, is a compelling, intense film, and this Blu-ray release at least allows you to see the best-available cut in high definition. Now if you’ll excuse me, watching all six different commentary tracks on five different films hasn’t exhausted my interest in Sergio Leone, so I have to go read Christopher Frayling’s fascinating-looking book about him now.

“The best thing in my half of the film—the only part of the film worth saving—is the sequence dedicated to the death of Marilyn Monroe.”

Let me cut to the chase and skip to the most useful bit of information that I can share—the 83-minute “reconstructed version” of this film, put together by Giuseppe Bertolucci, which has been screening as part of the complete Pasolini retrospective that has hit several major cities over the past couple of years—is not the version presented on the region-free DVD that is widely available from Raro.

The back text on the box of that release describes it as an “exclusive, uncut, restored version” and this is true—but the “restored” version is not the “reconstructed” version.

The “reconstructed” version is only available on a Region 2 (Europe-only) DVD which is, confusingly enough, also issued in a black, white, and red box by Raro.

It’s as if someone conceived of an ultimate video edition of La Rabbia, and then split the various elements of that package between two different discs/boxes, arbitrarily.

The more widely-available “restored” version (region-free) includes a 72-minute documentary hosted by Italian cinema critic & journalist Tatti Sanguineti, in which he describes in some detail the “reconstructed” version which would be issued seperately. Along with 5 different trailers, it also includes the much later (early 1970s) 13-minute short “The Walls of Sana’a”, a film which joined the successful effort to have Yemen’s historic city named a United Nations World Heritage site, and which makes for interesting viewing alongside Pasolini’s other developing-world studies such as “Notes Toward an African Oresteia.” None of these special features are to be found on the “reconstructed” version DVD.

The “reconstructed” version (Region 2), for extras, has instead a series of short interviews with various authorities: Cineteca di Bologna director/president Giuseppe Bertolucci, writer Vincenzo Cerami, Pasolini’s assistant director on La Rabbia Carlo di Carlo, photographer Mario Dondero, art historian Luigi Ficacci, and poet Valerio Magrelli. The reconstructed version starts from farther back in Pasolini’s planned order (rather than with the 20th sequence, about the Hungarian Revolution, with which the Pasolini-Guareschi half-and-half version rather abruptly begins). It drops the Guareschi half/film, and adds instead as an appendix some revealing moments from interviews with Pasolini.

If the two packages were put together into a single Blu-ray edition, the result would be a handy, single edition that would contain all of the elements that a motivated viewer would need to try to comprehend this supposedly failed Pasolini side project.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that ideal edition is ever going to happen, because Pasolini’s experiment with collage-based filmmaking has never been seen as central to his oeuvre. Or to put it plainly, successful. Even the wide-ranging and tolerant DVD Beaver calls it “less interesting as a film than for the story of its conception, reception, its withdrawal from circulation and disappearance, and its and rediscovery/restoration.”

I’m not completely convinced that’s fair. For one thing, that opinion seems to have been formed without viewing the reconstructed version.

Briefly put, that history is as follows:

The film was originally conceived as a 100-minute collage of archival/newsreel footage of geopolitical events, put together by Pasolini. Such a version, without the added poetic narration that Pasolini wrote and partially recorded, was shown to the film’s producer early on.

The producer promptly lost his nerve, or at least had second thoughts, and reconceived it as two 50-minute halves by different directors, with a right-wing section to be created by Giovannino Guareschi as a balance (or something) to Pasolini’s left-wing viewpoint.

Since neither director viewed the other’s film before creating their own, the film was not in fact the filmic conversation of two voices that it was promoted to be, and thus ended up not only a failure of nerve but also a failure as a film experience—two difficult voices talking into the air, as it were, in succession, with no mutual engagement. The two halves of the film truly had nothing substantially to do with each other.

The film was quickly withdrawn from circulation (reasons are debated), and its two halves would be intermittently screened independently over the years, in the form of B&W 16mm prints that were missing the colour material from the original.

The lost colour negatives were discovered in 2005 which allowed the “restored” version to be issued on DVD in 2008.

The “reconstructed” version followed soon after.

The reconstructed section that has been added to the “head” of Pasolini’s film, does, it must be said, feel different from the subsequent material. Yes, it features the words that he wrote, over the same footage with which he had planned to match those words. But, in the total absence of originally shot footage, it is Pasolini’s fluid-yet-abrupt editing style, and not just his poetic-philosophical mode of expression, that makes his surviving original half feel like a Pasolini film. It’s clear that even the most faithful reconstructor cannot fake that.

But I still recommend it as the version to watch first—and so I think that the right choice has been made to feature it in the retrospective screening series. It is not just that it includes more of Pasolini’s original vision—it is also that the additional material helps to contextual and introduce what follows. What is more, the notes that come with the DVD booklet are excellent for filling in the historical background of the newsreel images that flicker by. They open up the film’s references to a current viewer.

Lastly… how remarkable is this film’s poetic flight out of images of delusion, death, and destruction into this tribute to Marilyn Monroe?

Shoot, like a golden dove.
The world has taught you [how].
Thus your beauty becomes [the beauty] of the world.
A beauty of the stupid ancient world and the ferocious future world which was not ashamed
of alluding to the budding breasts of a younger sister [or]
to a tiny belly so easily seen naked.
And for this reason it was beautiful: beautiful like the sweet, coloured beggars,
the gypsies and the daughters of shopkeepers who win beauty pageants in Miami or Rome.
The world taught you [how] and thus your beauty was no longer beauty.
But you continued to be a child,
as silly as ancient times, as cruel as the future …
And between you and your beauty possessed by power
there was all the stupidity and cruelty of the present.
Shoot, like a white shadow of gold.

In the Decameron I filmed the way I know how: more than ever in my own style. But while in Porcile and Medea my game was atrocity, now strangely it’s happiness. A happy work (made with great seriousness, of course) seems to me to contradict all expectations. It’s complete disobedience. (But maybe I’m lying.)

Pier Paolo Pasolini, interviewed November 24, 1970

Making the decision to read Pasolini’s source texts before viewing each of his last four feature films, all of which are literary adaptations, rather derailed, for a while, my plan to watch all 13 features in the space of a year or less. Rather than charging straight ahead from Medea to The Decameron, I took the time to read all 800 pages of the McWilliam translation/Penguin edition (and posted a brief review). I probably could have prepared just by reading the 10 stories of Boccaccio’s 100 that made it into the movie (helpfully listed by Wikipedia) but it’s a work I’ve long been wanting to read and I wanted to soak up the flavour of the entire text.

Baliani’s play is almost the direct opposite of Pasolini’s film in theme and, to some degree, in tone—fascinating to see the degree to which readings of Boccaccio’s text can vary. Let it be said that the current crop of Dal Theatre students are a game, talented crew of performers who gave Baliani’s version a energetic workout, to say the least. But in the Baliani play, the background of the bubonic plague weighs heavily on the proceedings. Where the book is mostly diversion and escape, the play is weighed down with constant reminders of doom.

The play makes much of the tale of the scholar’s revenge—the perhaps-autobiographical revenge fantasy that others might suggest is both ethically problematic and a poor fit with much of the rest of the work. The ethical problem is countered partly by finding an improbable ray of hope at the end—a twist which diverges from the source text completely. For his part Pasolini didn’t include it amongst the nine tales that he chose, and in fact, there are only two tales that show up both in the Baliani play and the Pasolini film.

The Decameron itself is, needless to say, a challenging text for adaptation to any visual medium. As a lengthy collection of a hundred stories, most without overlapping characters, the main decisions are which small fraction of the stories to include, and what to do with the narrative framing device.

In the book, 10 young Florentines try, in the summer of 1348, to escape from the Black Death that is sweeping their city. They take turns each day in their country estate retreat MC’ing a round of story-telling, so that each of 10 days, each of the 10 plague-refugees tells one story. The Baliani play uses the group of young people to both tell and enact the stories, blurring the lines deliberately between those roles, while Pasolini’s film jettisons the framing altogether, relying on 10 original linking scenes that include dream sequence animations of paintings and a kind of framing story involving a painter (played by Pasolini himself), and an overall consistency of tone and visual expression to create something that feels more unified than the the typical anthology film.

In reality I was not just having fun with this film. I understood something very simple that it had taken me ten films to understand: namely, that cinema is a game… I’ve discovered play.

Even when Pasolini is playing he is doing so with rigour—in this film it is his way of insisting on what seems to me an essential quality of the source text. Boccaccio’s stories, for the most part, have a very un-fraught and down-to-earth way of presenting sexuality, and Pasolini insists on being cinematically true to that. In the story of the young man who pretends to be a mute in order to secure work and residence at a convent for the purpose of regular intercourse with the nuns, we get a scene with a young, sex-curious nun pulling up her skirt and giving him the wave-in, as we say, cutting to a head-on shot of his nude, tumescent member—yep, Pasolini sees no reason to flinch from the nun’s-eye-view of a naked boner (1971 seems like another world, now, doesn’t it?). But at the same time the film has really very little in common with porn as it is produced now—what the sexual scenes all have in common is a kind of innocent glee. They are well-lit to establish a joyful, carefree tone rather than to provide pornographic inspections of anatomy and sexual mechanics.

Pasolini, in this film, provides some flashes of mortality and doom around the edges, here and there, without reversing the overall direction and tone of his source text. It must have seemed a very daring film in 1971, and in some respects still seems today—but other than by its choice of stories it doesn’t seem to have the least bit of interest in correcting Boccaccio, or reading him against the grain. It is a cinematic argument that Boccaccio is forever contemporary, and in its own way I feel, on first viewing, that this film earns its own lasting relevance.

I’m not really sure why it took me so long to get around to Fellini’s 1973 classic—his 4th and final winner of the best foreign language film Oscar—but I’m glad I finally did. Amarcord feels like a film that everyone ought to be able to agree on… film snob and casual moviegoer alike. It moves with a kind of effortless joyous bouyancy, anchored by a melancholy for the irretrievable past, which is only magnified when one considers its status as both the fulsome culmination and the doom-harbinger of the arthouse cinema tradition.

It features an outstanding script from Tonino Guerra (L’Avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, Nostalghia, Night of the Shooting Stars, Eternity and a Day) and one of the best scores by Nino Rota (yes, I think it’s even better than the Godfather soundtrack).

Amarcord is convincingly personal even though it is only glancingly and intermittently autobiographical. The hyperreal world of 1930s small-town Italy that it re/creates is absurdly fantastical and convincingly real by turns, yet it unfolds seamlessly.

I’m increasingly convinced that I never gave Fellini his proper due, even though I’ve always been moved and impressed by the films of his that I’ve seen (Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, 8-1/2, Juliet of the Spirits). Ever since my visit last year to Teatro 5 at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, where he made many of his films (including Amarcord), I’ve been infected with curiosity about his life and work. On my viewing agenda for this year, then: recent Blu-ray releases of Il Bidone and City of Women, and the forthcoming release of Roma.